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CHAPTER SEVEN Racism and Neoconservatism, 1968–1980 Modern conservatism after 1945 was a reaction to the New Deal, modernity, international Communism, and the beginnings of the protest phase of the civil rights movement. Neoconservatism or the men and women who became neoconservatives generally supported the New Deal, modernity, Brown, and the early civil rights protest. Cold war liberals, they viewed the civil rights struggle as part of the campaign against international communism. These erstwhile liberals (and in some cases radicals) embraced conservatism when the civil rights movement turned toward radicalism, as a reaction to the black power movement;1 the ghetto revolts;2 and Martin Luther King’s increasing radicalism as manifested in his opposition to the Vietnam War and his call for “a radical restructuring” of the economy in order to achieve a more equalitarian society.3 Neoconservatism was also a response to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society or, more precisely, to its War on Poverty and affirmative action, policies that were viewed as dangerous steps toward an equalitarianism that threatened to undermine core Lockean values. Thus, like traditional postwar conservatism, neoconservatism emerged in the 1960s partly as a response to the black struggle for equality. But like traditional conservatism neoconservatism was a fusion of reactions by some liberals to multiple developments of the 1960s and early 1970s. My focus is on the role of race and racism. But neoconservatism was also a reaction to the campus rebellions that began at Berkeley in 1964, to the adversarial youth counterculture, and to the antiwar and feminist movements. Also like traditional conservatism, neoconservatism was first an intellectual movement premised on the Weaverian notion that ideas have consequences , consequences, that is, if they are well financed and publicized and have access to the suites of power. The neoconservatives also drew on some of the same intellectual resources as the conservatives, including Burke and Leo Strauss. But ultimately they too were Lockeans defending a debastardized Locke against liberal, Rousseanlike challenges. Like their traditional counterparts, as conservatives they were sometimes breathtakingly inconsistent, attacking the elites of the culture while pandering to the masses. 91 92 Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same This majoritarian element of neoconservatism was in sync with the efforts of conservative politicians such as George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan to awaken and politically mobilize the “Silent Majority” that was “unyoung, unpoor, and unblack” in a backlash against the forces of social change.4 Neoconservatism’s intellectual assault on the black quest for equality can be traced through an examination of its ideas about equality generally and its specific attacks on the welfare state, affirmative action, and the War on Poverty. Although these ideas were generally expressed in race-neutral language, they often had a specifically racial and at times white supremacist component. In both its race-neutral and race-specific components neoconservatism and racism in effect became the same. Finally, the neoconservative movement and the election of President Reagan helped to give rise to a small but vocal group of black neoconservatives who, unlike Booker Washington and George Schuyler, were not required to embrace conservatism because of fear of extermination. I examine each of these aspects of the neoconservative movement in this chapter; however, before doing so, I should note that traditional conservatism as expressed in the pages of National Review was not silent in response to the civil rights movement’s turn toward radicalism. Rather, after its grudging accommodation to the civil rights reforms enacted in the mid-1960s, it resurrected the Reconstruction era ideas of Andrew Johnson, the Supreme Court, and Booker Washington. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 Justice Joseph Bradley wrote: “When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.”5 In his 1866 veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, President Johnson wrote, “The idea on which the slaves were assisted to freedom was that on becoming free they would be a self-sustaining population. Any legislation that shall imply they are not expected to attain a self-sustaining condition must have a tendency injurious alike to their...

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