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9. In Transition
- University of Washington Press
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9 IN TRANSITION Had we known what would happen during the Nixon presidency, I am certain that Johnson, Humphrey, McCarthy, the Kennedys, and all Democrats involved in the 1968 election would have made whatever extra eªort was necessary to win the presidency for Humphrey. Nixon had campaigned with a“bring us together”slogan.Yet his“Southern Strategy”was based on a crude political calculation that disaªected white Southerners would form a new political base for the Republican Party. Few believed he would continue the American involvement in Vietnam.Yet more casualties were incurred there after his election than during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies combined.The Voting Rights Act,Medicare,Medicaid , federal aid to education, and other Great Society–era initiatives had become embedded in national life and could not have been reversed, any more than Social Security and other New Deal initiatives could have been reversed after President Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure. Nixon’s continuance of the Vietnam commitment, and the Watergate scandal which eventually brought him down, were to prove his most damaging legacies. They contributed to a general public cynicism about politics that has not been overcome to this day. Humphrey, by contrast, would have liquidated American involvement in the war. Nixon’s opposite in temperament, Humphrey would have been incapable of launching the paranoid series of covert operations that became known as Watergate—or of lying about them.His style of governance would have been open and inclusive. Humphrey simply was incapable of playing Americans oª against each other on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or regional diªerences. Nixon’s domestic initiatives did provide a point of departure from the Great Society. He undertook environmental legislation that the Johnson Administration had not. His “new federalism” concept of domestic governance was to devolve power to state and local levels while maintaining the federal government as a central tax collector. Thus his concept of “revenue 105 sharing,” in which the federal government was to collect taxes and then distribute them to lower levels of government with few strings attached. He made one big policy change, which at the time seemed incremental. That was Nixon’s sponsorship of a‹rmative action, in which quotas and setasides were to be reserved for minorities in hiring and contracting, school admissions, and other parts of American life. It began with the so-called Philadelphia Plan,administered by Labor Secretary George Shultz,in which unions and employers in the notoriously discriminatory construction industry agreed to guarantee minority involvement.The concept then spread generally . Until then, the traditional Democratic and liberal approach had been to first eradicate legal barriers to equality through such measures as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and then improve the skills of minorities through education, job training, and other programs that would help them have a more equal chance at the economic and social starting lines. Such programs were income rather than race based.Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Head Start were perfect examples. Children from poor families were provided with extra education assistance to enable them to catch up to their peers. The Job Corps was another, in which poor kids were given practical skills training to prepare them for work.Most,though not all, of such children were from minority families. President Kennedy had once used the words “affirmative action” in a memo. But it was never contemplated, before Nixon, that any Great Society, anti-poverty,or civil-rights initiative would be explicitly race-based or attempt to guarantee not just opportunity but also an outcome.The cornerstone 1964 Civil Rights Act,after all,prohibited discrimination either in favor of or against any person on the basis of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity.Yet today, transformed from a‹rmative action to“diversity,”this Nixon-era reorientation has created de facto quotas and guaranteed school admission, employment, job promotion,and public contracting outcomes in many parts of American private and public life.Where such policies are denounced, it is often, ironically, on the basis that they are vestiges of the 1960s Kennedy and Johnson eras. In the early 1970s, when this reorientation took place, congressional liberals who had championed civil rights almost universally questioned it. But, in deference to minority leaders who liked the idea, most stood silent. At an Americans for Democratic Action conference, I argued on behalf of a‹rmative action as a temporary means to compensate for past discrimination . But Humphrey, among others, thought...