Is “Right Turn” the Wrong Frame for American History after the 1960s?

“The real dividing line in recent American history,” remarked the late Christopher Lasch, “is the line between those who lived through the 1960s and those who didn’t. All of us who experienced the 60s, that profound upheaval after which nothing was ever the same again, were unavoidably marked for life.”¹ The same could be said of Lasch’s profession, American history. Out went consensus. In came revisionism, black history, women’s history, the new social history. The 1960s themselves soon became the subject of courses, books, and articles. In 2008, forty years after its annus horribilis, the decade achieved the ultimate sign of academic arrival, its own journal.

American historians agree that the left-liberal and radical movements of the 1960s—civil rights, the war on poverty, black militancy, antiwar protest, the rising counterculture—provoked a conservative reaction. That reaction upended liberal Democrats in the 1966 and 1968 elections and marked the beginning of the end of the New Deal coalition. Less clear, however, is the long-term significance of the conservative counterrevolution. Even the most basic question—who won?—is still disputed. The conventional answer is that conservative Republicans won—eventually. Richard Nixon demonstrated the power of selective, semi-sanitized backlash politics. But he also disappointed conservatives by pursuing détente, spending freely on domestic programs, capitulating to liberal pressure groups like environmentalists, and bringing disgrace and electoral disaster with the Watergate scandal. Meanwhile the culture slipped further into solipsism and decadence. Abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, pornography, pot, the jiggle quotient: by the mid-1970s the moral indices were running strongly against conservatives. If the 1960s are the Friday night of American history, the 1970s are the Saturday night when the party really got going.

But conservative activists refused to quit. With the help of corporate money, they patiently built organizations, nurtured intellectual talent, and mobilized anxieties about race, Soviet adventurism, declining morality, and a stagnant, inflation-prone economy. Following the muddled Carter interregnum, they achieved lasting victory when in 1980 Ronald Reagan won the White House, his party the Senate. Reagan became the Republican FDR, the charismatic leader whose triumph over adversity and historic presidency marked the onset of a new conservative era; or so it seemed to many journalists and historians, who used titles like America’s Right Turn, The World Turned Right Side Up, The Right Nation, and Rightward Bound to describe the conservative shift.²

In some ways the right-turn metaphor was accurate. Criminal-justice policies hardened, with stiffer mandatory sentences, new death penalty statutes, and a punitive drug war backed by both parties. Reagan confronted the Soviet Union, broke the 1981 air-traffic controllers strike, encouraged deregulation, and named conservative judges and cabinet officials. Reagan’s tax battles of 1981-86 reduced taxes on the wealthy, if not by as large an amount as he had hoped, thanks to concessions won by congressional Democrats. Unfazed, Reagan continued to preach the gospel of capitalist prosperity. Pundits called him “the great communicator,” though “the great legitimator” would have done as well, considering his tireless efforts to promote the social virtues of free enterprise and private wealth. Like Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, the details of Reagan’s policies often mattered less than the way he reshaped the political climate. That is why historians speak of an “Age of Reagan.”

The rub is that the Age of Reagan was neither an age of conservatism tout court nor anything like an inversion of the cultural trends of the 1960s. MTV (founded 1981), the Playboy Channel (founded 1982), and the Madonna brand (founded 1982, reinvented annually) were hardly signs of a return to the 1950s. With a few gestural exceptions, such as the removal of abortion coverage from federal employees’ health insurance and more federal pornography prosecutions, the GOP’s culture war was mostly verbal. What Reagan gave the Religious Right, Sean Wilentz has observed, was speeches. Deeds were another matter. His first Supreme Court nominee, Sandra Day O’Connor, came with pro-choice credentials. Her vote, and that of later Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy and David Souter...