Neo-liberalism: Rage of the Unempowered 2

Conservative Republican hopes were utterly dashed by Eisenhower. Unions survived as did Social Security. American bases remained open all over the planet. There were more huge governmental projects—like the superhighway system and the beginning of the space race. We went right on participating in the Cold War.
Two interesting points about Eisenhower: his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was trained under Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state—as was Kennedy and Johnson’s secretary of state. It was called—validly—bipartisan foreign policy.
Secondly, Eisenhower offered the conservatives some red meat by naming Dick Nixon (at easterner Tom Dewey’s insistence) as Vice President. Nixon was an interesting study in contradiction: he was a master at “red baiting” (winning by calling the other guy a communist). He had found the contradictions in Alger Hiss’s testimony that sent him to prison for perjury. Yet he was also a very intelligent, bone deep pragmatist.
As President, Nixon signed the law that permitted women of whatever income to buy a car without a husband or father to co-sign. He opened the door to China after 23 years of non-recognition. He allowed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to live after LBJ tried to gut it. (Yes, Johnson did. I was on staff at the time.) Nixon was at home with the eastern wing of the party and, all in all, I would have to place him there.
So the conservative Republicans sat and seethed while the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations presided over an internationalist foreign policy and ever bigger government. They were so far out of power and had been for so long it looked as if they would never see the inside of the oval office or the Speaker of the House’s dais again.
In 1973, the Supreme Court handed them a winning issue. Claiming that the 14th Amendment’s “due process clause” grants an absolute right to privacy, the Court struck down state laws against abortion and made it a federally guaranteed right.
Even some progressive (modern “liberal”) legal scholars were horrified at the court’s reasoning, but, no matter. The issue was on the table. Clever political operatives would use it to forge an alliance between evangelical Christians and economically conservative politicians.
It was scarcely made in heaven. Conservative Christians had basically stayed out of politics since the end of World War II. (They snored through the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater, allowing him to lose by the largest landslide ever.) But the long out of power conservative (Neo-liberal) Republicans woke them up by harping on issues like abortion and by flattering the Christians into believing they were the “silent majority” who only needed to begin voting to set everything right.
The Party managed to convince large numbers of evangelicals that Reagan was really one of them—that their issues were his issues. They believed it and poured out of their pews in huge numbers to elect the first conservative Republican since Herbert Hoover.
Of course Mr. Reagan’s issues weren’t really those of the so-called “religious right”. He paid lip-service to issues (especially abortion) dear to the no longer silent minority, but he did very little to advance any of them. HIS issues were economic and governmental.
Unfortunately the evangelicals were unable to recognize this until they had been thoroughly suborned and made to look ridiculous if not vicious. Some day someone will do a real study on the damage done to American Christianity by its dalliance with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But that isn’t our purpose here.
The point is—by using Christian outrage over Roe v Wade and Christian votes—the Hoover/Taft/Dirksen wing of the party returned to power after 50 years. For the moment it was only a limited power, but its impact would grow over the next thirty years. More later.